Yeah, really. Mine took 3 weeks just to start getting sour.
If you ever want to ask the people at the Korean grocery store for that specifically, ask for “go-chu ga-ru” with the “ru” really being more halfway between a ru and a lu. Also, just as a brief aside, it’s not 4 characters but 4 syllables, each with a consonant and a vowel.
If you don’t feel like making kimchi, lots of restaurants will sell you their kimchi too. Don’t know how prices are, but if you like the kimchi at a restaurant, it doesn’t hurt to ask.
That just means literally “red pepper powder” - it says nothing about how coarse or fine the grind is. Any Korean red pepper powder is going to be of the same grind.
Crap. Yeah, right after I posted that I suddenly had a feeling that somebody was going to come along and tell me just that. :smack: I have a package of ground red pepper that I verified through the store manager is the right type for kimchi. If I scan the package, can you tell where the salient information actually is?
I’ve been in big Korean markets, and there is always an aisle devoted to big bags of red pepper powder. It’s an important item, to say the least. Of course, these same markets will also have a kimchi bar, which resembles a salad bar and from which you may choose from an astonishing variety of pickled vegies and fish. So I always just buy mine ready-made!
Then I go to the seaweed section and buy some salted, roasted nori. Nom!
Yeah, Korean nori kicks ass over Japanese nori. Korean food is the bomb. If I were told that I could only eat one type of Asian cuisine, I would pick Korean hands down. As a matter of fact, I have a small ribeye that I just bought, and I’m going grill it up right now and eat it with some white basmati and a big helping of kimchi. Nom nom nom nom nom! 
In the book The Man Who Ate Everything, Jeffrey Steingarten relates how he conditioned himself to like all foods in order to do an effective job as the newly-appointed restaurant critic of Vogue. His biggest hurdle in the beginning was kimchee, which he described as “the national pickle of Korea.” He had always loathed it. But after eating it regularly for a number of weeks, he was able to learn to love it. He proclaimed, “now it’s my national pickle, too.”
I made a trip to the Galleria Market on the corner of Devonshire and Reseda yesterday and picked up a gallon of regular kimchi and a gallon of radish kimchi. I’ve never tried the radish variety before, so I thought I would give it a shot. I’m going to crack it open tonight and eat it with some calrose rice and leftover chicken wings.
Koreans sure are uptight about their pooping habits. Check out this terlet. The display kiosk adjacent to it is stocked with all sorts of Harry Potter-esque concoctions intended to keep your bowels open and the sluices flowing. I should of taken a close-up of the control panel on the bidet.
Crap—I forgot to mention—they also have turnip green kimchi there. I’m looking forward to trying that next time.
A GALLON of each? Wow!
Since Johnny L.A. started this thread a couple months ago, I was inspired to make my own kimchee. I got some Napa cabbage, salt, garlic, dried shrimp, Korean red pepper powder, and green onions, water, and some leftover kimchee I had from Chicago Kimchee (a local kimchee maker) to jump-start the fermentation. The stuff took off fast! I had plenty sour and fermented kimchee within three days.
So, if you have some leftover kimchee, use that as your starter to get things going fast.
I buy 126 oz jars from Chicago Kimchee (for about $10), and that looks to be about a gallon to me. It you like kimchee, that’ll go in a flash.
I never got to it. I got a small jar from the supermarket, and that satisfied my craving.
But I kept needscoffee’s email in my webmail so I can find the shop she suggested in case I want to go there after work one day. 
Errr…I misspoke. They’re more like half a gallon. They’re 56 ounces each, as opposed to the 120-ounce jars that I usually buy. But the way I eat the stuff, they’ll probably both be history in about three weeks.
Still mighty impressive! I need to get to work on developing a taste for it.
Well, you can have what’s left of my radish kimchi. Quite frankly, I didn’t like it at all. It has a completely different flavor from cabbage kimchi. However, this won’t dissuade me from trying kimchi made from other vegetables such as turnip greens or broccoli.
I would totally take it. Radish kimchi is my favorite.
If you refer to this thread, I mention “Green Kimchee” or “Spicy Sauerkraut”. I’m trying to imagine a fresh Kimchee with green chiles instead of red chile poowder or perhaps a combination of red dried and fresh green… Perhaps there is something like this in Korean Cuisine.
I am looking AT you, HNC (Hazel Nut Coffee)!?